Altercation: How to Cover the Big Lies, and Understand Those Who Fall for Them

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The American Prospect
@TheProspect
The media still hasn't figured out how to cover the Big Lie and its adherents. In today's #Altercation newsletter, @Eric_Alterman discusses the gravity of the threat:

Altercation: How to Cover the Big Lies, and Understand Those Who Fall for Them
The media’s still struggling to depict the dangers and the roots of the right’s mass delusions.
prospect.org
12:01 PM · Jul 9, 2021

https://prospect.org/politics/altercation-how-to-cover-the-big-lies-understand-those-who-fall-for-them/

I write a great deal about political lying, together with the failure of the members of the mainstream media to deal effectively with its current epidemic proportions. This is in part because I’ve written two books and a dissertation on the topic. (This one is still sort of new.) But to be honest, the fact of the now near-pathological lying emanating from today’s Republican Party is only a part of the problem facing the future of our country. Even more worrisome is the character of their content.

The Times offered up a mini tour of Republican crazyland in a piece focusing on Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, who became famous when six of his siblings banded together to warn the rest of the country never to vote for him. The Times notes that Gosar “falsely suggested in 2017 that the deadly far-right rally in Charlottesville was planned by liberals and funded by George Soros. More recently, he has questioned whether federal law enforcement officials planted agents in far-right groups that stormed the Capitol.”

Deeper in, things grow in size and scope. The lunatic league’s leader, per usual, is Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom Donald Trump picked recently as his warm-up act for one of his Nuremberg-style hate fests. Greene, the piece reports, has “endorsed executing Democratic lawmakers, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She was also an adherent of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy movement that holds that a corrupt cabal of Democrats, global elites and career government employees who run a Satan-worshiping child sex-trafficking ring will soon be rounded up and punished for their misdeeds, and that Mr. Trump will be restored to the presidency.” If that’s not nutty enough for you, there’s the fact that she has repeatedly compared COVID vaccinations to the Holocaust: “We can look back in a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens—so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.” Even after admitting that she may have gone a little far in the above, and even after a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Greene returned to the very same analogy by characterizing the officials in the Biden administration’s push to encourage all Americans to get vaccinated against the coronavirus as “medical brown shirts.”

I am almost always tempted to fill up this space with similar lunacy, both in sympathy with the journalists who have to figure out how to cover it, but also to illustrate just how much more serious is the threat these people portend for our republic than our media has so far been willing or able to portray. Take a look, if you have not already, at the Times’ incredible 40-minute video about the events of January 6 if you imagine that next time, we can expect an opposition that respects a peaceful presidential election, democratically arrived at, and accepted by the likes of Trump and his increasingly violent-minded foot soldiers.

*snip*